Arts & Culture | Theater

The acclaimed dance-theater artist Martha Clarke says she has, for “some unknown reason,” always been “drawn to the historical.”

Maybe Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera” is the reason. She certainly has some history with the classic theater work about criminality and corruption set during the waning days of the pre-World War II Weimar Republic in Germany.

Of all American comedians, none is more instantly recognizable than Groucho Marx. With his rolling eyes, greasepaint mustache, waggling cigar and stooped posture, Groucho remains part of our national consciousness more than three decades after his death. In his acclaimed traveling show, “An Evening With Groucho,” which comes to Queens this weekend, Frank Ferrante channels the great comedian. Accompanied by an on-stage pianist, Ferrante recreates Groucho’s routines, ad-libs with the audience, and warbles some of Groucho’s best-known songs, including “Hooray for Captain Spaulding” and “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady.”

He was a heretic who boldly helped to invent secular Judaism. The 17th-century Dutch Jewish philosopher, Uriel Acosta, questioned Jewish orthodoxy at a time when the Jewish community in Amsterdam was still reeling from the Inquisition — and desperately seeking respectability in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews alike. Now, in the capstone production of its two-year Yiddish theater project, comes Target Margin’s “Uriel Acosta: I Want That Man!” Now in previews, it opens next Monday night in Queens for a two-week run, with four actors each playing Acosta, in addition to other roles.

From Bert Lahr to Jack Gilford, among the most beloved of Broadway performers are “character actors” — those who play quirky and eccentric characters, often in supporting roles. With “Character Man,” Jim Brochu pays tribute to the character actors of yesteryear (many of whom were Jewish) who made an indelible mark on the theater. The one-man show opened last week Off-Broadway.

Mention the name of Jewish screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, and most people think of “Marty,” the path-breaking 1950s teleplay turned film about a lonely Italian-American butcher in the Bronx. Or they think of the electrifying scene in the 1976 Sidney Lumet film, “Network,” in which a TV anchorman demands that all New Yorkers throw open their windows and shout, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!”

Conflict between brothers is a familiar theme in Jewish culture, from warring brothers in the Torah to sibling rivalry in Joel and Ethan Coen’s “A Serious Man.” Now comes Charles Gershman’s one-act drama, “Shooting Abe,” in which an Orthodox Jew bursts into his photographer brother’s nude male photo shoot. The play, which asks how far a Jew can stray from his heritage, continues this week at the Frigid New York Festival on the Lower East Side.